After nearly a year of touring with a band for his acclaimed, successful album “The Low Highway,” Earle now is working on his third book, just finished a movie and wrapped up his role on a hit HBO TV series.

Steve Earle

Now he’s reinventing himself as one half of an acoustic guitar duo with Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin.

The pair starts a tour March 18 in Pittsburgh that comes to Musikfest Cafe in Bethlehem on March 19 and Keswick Theatre in Glenside March 29.

In a telephone interview this week from New York City, where he lives, Earle says he expects the pair will play his songs, such the 1988 Top 10 hit “Copperhead Road” and Colvin’s chart-topping 1997 song “Sunny Came Home,” as well as some surprise covers.

Earle also spoke about all the projects he’s been doing lately, as well as his past and future.

Here’s a transcript of the call:

LEHIGH VALLEY MUSIC: Hi Steve. How are you?

STEVE EARLE: “Oh, I’m fine. Just workin’. I’m working on a book, so I’m trying to bang out my 500 words a day whenever I can.”

Sorry to interrupt. I won’t take up too much of your time.

“No, it’s part of my job.”

[Laughs] The tour hasn’t started yet, right?

“No. Shawn and I are meeting up in Pittsburgh on St. Patrick’s Day to rehearse, and the tour starts the next day there.”

Do you have any idea what the show’s going to be like? Are you going to be singing together? Are you going to be doing each others’ songs?

Earle, left, and Shawn Colvin

“It’s the two of us on stage the whole time. We’re going to do … we don’t know what’s going to happen. We have no idea what’s going to happen, ‘cause we’ve never done this before. We’ve known each other for a long time – we’re kind of the same graduating class [laughs].”

[Laughs]

“But it’s gonna be a guitar-pool thing, where both of us will go out and do the set together, and it’ll be my stuff, her stuff and, knowing her, probably some covers that nobody expects. That’s just … she’s pretty famous for that.”

Yeah. So tell me how the pairing came together. How did you guys decide to do it?

“I’m not sure. I think it was maybe suggested by somebody else, but I can’t even remember who it was, and we talked about it for a while. It was, like, somebody either in my camp or her camp. And we have other friends that do stuff, and Shawn’s part of the trio thing she did with Emmy [Lou Harris] and Patty Griffin – the three-girls-and-their-buddy thing.

“So, you know, it’s whitewashing the fence. It’s going out and trying to reach people in each others’ audience that we wouldn’t normally reach – getting our audiences together in one place. We have a lot of audience in common, but … And doing half the amount of work for the same amount of money, so there’s that factor [Laughs]. We’ve both been doing this awhile, so it’s ways top keep it interesting for audiences.

“I play in a lot of formats. This summer I’m doing dates with Colvin, I’m doing solo shows, I’m doing dates with [his band] The Dukes, and I’m doing dates with the Bluegrass Dukes. I like to do lots of stuff. I’m in between record cycles and I do all kinds of stuff in between record cycles. Shawn and I met when I first – after [his album] ‘Guitar Town’ came out, I started pretty early on doing solo tours in between my band tours. One thing, I make more money – I can, kind of, save up some money. ‘Cause you get roughly the same amount of money to play solo as you do with a band. Well, you get exactly the same amount of money solo as you do with the band.

“I started doing that, and also, it became part of my process for writing songs for the next record. It was the only thing I knew how to do, ‘cause I’d been a solo artist for years, and Shawn had done a lot of that, too. And we met - -we did a couple of gigs together really close together. We played a benefit in Boston and then just within a week or two after that we played this show together at The Iron Horse in Northampton, Mass. That was just as her first record was coming out, and in between my first and second record.

“So that’s a lot of it. Part of the connection that we have comes from going out there with one guitar and playing – the fact that we both can do that. She’s really good – a really great guitar player and a really good solo performer. Not everybody can do that. There’s probably some people that could do it if they let themselves do it, but I’m very thankful that I can go out with one guitar and make a living if I need to.”

And that’s all it is – is just you two and two guitars, not other players?

“Yeah, just me and Shawn. I’ll probably have more than one guitar, and I’ll probably have a mandolin and a 12-striong and some other stuff, but, you know …”

Well, I’ve got to tell you: I saw you twice in the past year or so – you played Bethlehem, Pa., at our Sands Casino and then you played a place called Sellersville Theater in Sellersville, Pa.

“Right.”

Saw you both times, loved your show both times. The Dukes and Duchess were great.

“It’s a great band. It’s the best band I’ve ever had. We’ll be back out again with it some this summer, mostly out west. We’ll play some festivals and … I work a lot. I’m doing a songwriting camp in the Catskills.”

I read about that, yeah.

“Last I saw, I’ve got 106 students coming for that. And then we’re going to Europe with the band. The next thing for me after this is I go to Australia with the band – Australia, New Zealand. Then I come back, and another run with Colvin in May out west, then I start my touring for the summer immediately following that, which is the band in June on this side of the pond and then I’m going to go to Europe early solo and play a handful of shows, mostly in England, then the band comes over and we’re doing three or four festivals, then I’m going to stay and play solo shows [laughs] after the band goes home, so I’ll be there till September.”

Busy year. Let me run through a couple of things as far as the recording end of it. So OK, [your album] “The Low Highway” comes out – great album. Give me an idea of what you wanted to do with that – in writing the disc. And how do you think it turned out?

“Well, musically I was trying to write a record for the best band I’ve ever had and I was sort of writing it as we were touring at the end of the cycle for [2011’s] ‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,’ which is sort of when this version of the band was formed. … Chris and Eleanor are the newcomers, and originally, musically, I just wanted to write a record for that band.

“But then I was touring when I wrote it, so I’m writing all these songs looking out the window of a tour bus. And I realized that what I was seeing was an America a lot closer to what Woody Guthrie saw, and so it became that – it became songs about me seeing us out the window of a tour bus. You know, I travel a lot, and what I’m seeing is something different from what I was seeing two years ago. And it wasn’t necessarily positive.

“I think that all of us who do this job that I do have these roots in the Depression. Kids now that do the singer-songwriter even dress like they’re living in the Depression.”

Yeah, yeah.

“And it goes back to Bob Dylan kind of becoming Woody Guthrie for 30 seconds as he was becoming Bob Dylan, and so we all have this connection to it and none of us – including Bob – ever witnessed that first-hand. “

Good point.

“It’s all through the music. But now, we are witnessing it firsthand. These are really, really genuinely tough times that have lasted a long time. I don’t know what the difference between a depression and a recession is when it goes on for this long, to tell you the truth.”

And you had success with that album. The song “Invisible” got nominated for a Grammy Award. And then you put out the box set “The Warner Brother Years.” What was behind that? How did that come about?

“Well, it wasShout Factory [Records] contacted us and said they had a chance to option. A lot of the major labels are leasing out material to the smaller labels that want to put them out, and we were approached about it, and we were given some control, so worked with them a little bit. We got some control over the artwork, then we tried to come up with something to make it kind of special.

“Then the cool thing, and the reason to own that, was the CD version was Ray Kennedy, who’s been my partner, we owned a recording studio together for many years, and he still has been involved in my records on some level all along, he ran across a digital cassette recording, multi-track cassette recordings that we made as the Train Band. Cause [the 1995 album] ‘Train a Coming’ was part of that Warner Brothers package. ‘Train a Coming’ was recorded for a label called Winter Harvest, then Warner bought it when I signed with Warner.

“And that’s a great band. That’s Norman Blake and the late, great Roy Huskey Jr., and Peter Rowan were the band on that. And we toured very little. We played maybe 16 or 17 shows because Norman won’t fly and we didn’t do a lot. And it was very early in recovery for me and I didn’t know how I was going to do touring. So I was taking it kind of slow and easy.

“So we came up with the first performance I did in Nashville in 1995 after I got out of jail, which is December 1995. Bill Monroe sat in and Emmylou Harris sat in and we discovered we had a really good, clean recording of that whole show. So we mixed that and made that part of the package. That is getting ready to come out as a single record of its own. You’ll be able to purchase that live recording pretty soon.”

I will, too. And then you contributed the song “Just Before the Battle, Mother Farewell, Mother” to the compilation disc, “Divided & United: The Songs of the Civil War.” [Released in November, it included songs by Loretta Lynn, Ricky Skaggs, Vice Gill and more than two-dozen other artists]. Your song with Dirk Powell – how did that come together?

“Well, I was give a whole list of songs. That project is like a really cool record, the whole thing. There’s a lot of people on it. Pop music existed in the Civil War. There was a music business by the time the Civil War came along, and it was mostly based on the sale of sheet music. Stephen Foster, that whole deal , the whole Tin Pan Alley was being born as the country fell apart.

“And so there were a lot of songs that came out of that war. So the idea was .. we were contacted and we were given a list – sort of a Chinese restaurant menu of song titles. And I ran across – I was just looking at titles that were similar, listening to it – I ran across two versions of rally basically the same song. I ran across a song called ‘Just Before the Battle Mother,’ which is a very patriotic song about a guy going off to war and he’s gonna die and he’s very proud of himself for dying, but it’s his last letter to his mother, it’s very sad. It’s a melodrama. And then a contemporary parody of that song – an anti-war parody of that song.

“And I decided it would be cool to record it as the two of them together as a medley – one answering the other. So I put the two songs together. Dirk Powell is a really good friend of mine and Dirk may be the best old-time banjo player alive. I think that’s probably true. And he’s like a great fiddle player, he plays great accordion. Everything you hear on that except for the one guitar is Dirk and him singing. Dirk sings the patriotic version, I sing the peacenik, yellow-belly version of it. And I’m pretty proud of that recording actually; it’s one of my favorite things I ever recorded.”

Did I read you have a movie coming up? “The World Made Straight”?

“Yeah, I don’t know what the status of ‘The World Made Straight’ is. It hasn’t been sold yet. I haven’t seen it. I talked to the people that made it several times and I had a blast doing it – it was my first bad guy and first serious role. I played a bad guy in a comedy – I played two hillbilly drug dealers; one in a comedy and one in drama.”

Yeah, I noted that as I prepared for this interview.

“And it’s a similar character on the surface only, because this guy … ‘The World Made Straight’ is a novel by Ron Rash – he’s a North Carolina writer. And we shot it in and around Asheville. And Noah Wiley’s in it, Minka Kelly, Haley Jo Osmont. I learned a lot from doing it. It was by far my biggest part in anything ever. I mean, I’m THE bad guy and it was fun – it was a lot of fun. It was a really touchy, it was an independent movie. It was just about as low budget as a movie can get. In the horrible spring weather in the mountains – like, pouring rain. Scenes had to be moved inside that were meant to be shot outside. Sitting in trailers that the electricity had gone off in, freezing your ass off, waiting on the set.

“And my last night, we shot all night and I had to be on a plane the next day and play someplace. And I was slightly mildewed by the time I got to there.”

Well, I hope it gets out.

“I hope it gets seen. I mean, it’ll probably be seen somewhere. Everything at least ends up on DVD eventually. But I think it probably has a chance to be really good. I mean, we felt pretty good about what was going on out there. Noah stepped in late because the original lead bailed.

“People don’t realize, the movies that you see and the movies that get in theaters, the story of literally hundreds that get made and the ones that don’t get made. I mean, I’ve been optioning one short story of mine over and over again for years and it’s never been made into anything. And my book, you know, there’s an actor who owns an option on my last novel and it’ll come up for renewal.

“Jim Carroll had a cottage industry going from optioning ‘The Basketball Diaries’ over and over and over again before it finally got made [laughs]. It’s kind of how he lived for a long time.”

You mentioned at the beginning of the interview that you’re writing now.

“Yeah, I’m writing a memoir. It’s a literary memoir. It’s no an autobiography; it’s about mentors and it’s about recovery more than anything else. I mean, I hope the final result is it’s a book about recovery. It’s about Townes, it’s about people that sort of helped me survive my bottom – the street and jail – who weren’t necessarily looking out for my interests, they were protecting a commodity. But without them I probably wouldn’t be here.

“And then the third part’s about my grandfather, who started most of the 12-step meetings in Northeast Texas.”

Oh get out. The HBO show “Treme” is over. How did you enjoy working on that?

“’Treme’ was a blast. That role was written for me and I managed to lose a little bit of weight since I don’t have to go to New Orleans every 10 days. But I miss New Orleans a lot. I probably, if a lot of other things hadn’t happened in the last year or two, would have bought a place in New Orleans just to have it.

“But I’m going through – you know, my little boy has autism and Allison [Moorer, also a singer] and I are getting a divorce, so that’s kind of sidetracked a lot of stuff. I’m going to live in New York City for the rest of my life, but I have a dream of someday having a shotgun duplex in the biwater, so it doesn’t get looted and having a place in New Orleans when I want to go [Laughs]. I love New Orleans a lot.”

You mentioned that you’re between record cycles – and you’re writing a book and you’re doing concerts. Do you have time to write music, or do you write music at this point?

“Yeah, I’m writing music. I’m writing songs here and there. I’m trying to concentrate on the book because I’ve missed my deadline but I think I still might make the pub date. My publisher is Twelve, which is an imprint of Hachett. The deal is, they basically put out one book a month and the entire staff is devoted to that book for that month, which makes the release schedule rather rigid compared to what I’m used to [laughs]. So I’m trying to not miss my slot so that they have to rearrange everything around me. So that’s why I’ve kind of cleared the decks. [Laughs]

”The next record – there’s going to be a record. The next record’s going to be a blues record. I moved it back a little bit. I thought I was going to record this summer early, but I’ll probably record more like in the fall. So there won’t be a record this year, ‘cause I’m going to concentrate on the book. And I’m touring.

“And this deal with Shawn I’ve been looking forward to a long time. She’s one of the best solo performers I’ve ever seen. And that’s something I value a lot. I grew up seeing Loudon Wainwright and Steve Goodman And Townes [Van Zandt] – people who were really killer solo performers, and Shawn’s that good. So you’ll get to come out and watch us whitewash the fence, basically. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. I think it’s going to be cool.’”

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JOHN J. MOSER has been around long enough to have seen the original Ramones in a small club in New Jersey, U2 from the fourth row of a theater and Bob Dylan's born-again tours. But he also has the number for All-American Rejects' Nick Wheeler on his cell phone, wrote the first story ever done on Jack's Mannequin and hung out in Wiz Khalifa's hotel room.

OTHER CONTRIBUTORS

JODI DUCKETT: As The Morning Call's assistant features editor responsible for entertainment, she spends a lot of time surveying the music landscape and sizing up the Valley's festivals and club scene. She's no expert, but enjoys it all — especially artists who resonated in her younger years, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Tracy Chapman, Santana and Joni Mitchell.

KATHY LAUER-WILLIAMS enjoys all types of music, from roots rock and folk to classical and opera. Music has been a constant backdrop to her life since she first sat on the steps listening to her mother’s Broadway LPs when she was 2. Since becoming a mother herself, she has become well-versed on the growing genre of kindie rock and, with her son in tow, can boast she has seen a majority of the current kid’s performers from Dan Zanes to They Might Be Giants.

STEPHANIE SIGAFOOS: A Jersey native raised in Northeast PA, she was reared in a house littered with 8-tracks, 45s and cassette tapes of The Beatles, Elvis, Meatloaf and Billy Joel. She also grew up on the sounds of Reba McEntire, Garth Brooks and Tim McGraw and can be found traversing the countryside in search of the sounds of a steel guitar. A fan of today's 'new country,' she digs mainstream/country-pop crossovers like Lady Antebellum and Sugarland and other artists that illustrate the genre's diversity.